‘Grey Seal’: the strangely surreal Elton John song Bernie Taupin didn’t fully understand
Navigating different creative visions is one of the first learning curves when entering a musical partnership. While Elton John and Bernie Raupin remain one of the industry’s most iconic duos, their journey hasn’t been without challenges. However, although they have had their share of creative hurdles, one thing always remained: mutual respect and admiration.
That said, some of the most impactful partnerships in music history have been ones where both parties struggle to agree. This is not necessarily in the foundational sense but more in terms of artists generally holding differing views about how things should be approached behind the scenes when stakes are high and creativity runs wild.
While the two most obvious examples of this are, of course, the two collaborative duos that existed within The Beatles and The Rolling Stones (or the more fiery case of the Gallagher brothers), there’s much to be said about the longstanding partnership between Elton John and Bernie Taupin, particularly their more notable difficulties when trying to overcome personal or creative differences.
However, their collaboration also worked because they understood each other from the off. With anything they worked together on, John knew how to come up with immediate solutions, even if they seemed difficult to overcome in the first instance. “If you need to get something off your chest, he’s the first person you need to go to to get some easy answers,” Taupin once said, also describing John as “a complete constant” in his life.
Aside from a brief cold period with John’s A Single Man, much of what made their working environment great was a willingness to suspend disbelief, especially when creativity seemed to override anything logical or pragmatic. This was the case with ‘Grey Seal’, the somewhat surrealist track that made little sense to anybody, not even Taupin, who wrote it. While it would have been easy to adjust it, making it more accessible or even comprehensible, both parties knew it thrived on being abstract, proving that not everything had to follow the same format to work.
The song isn’t the easiest to understand, making it seem isolated from some of John’s bigger, more immediately captivating hits. However, its dreamlike quality only further proves Taupin’s prowess for off-kilter poetic lyricism, showing that art—at least their flavour of it—doesn’t always have to immediately pull you in to make a lasting impact. Moreover, it demonstrated John’s ability to trust Taupin, even if his creation seemed to veer far away from their usual game.
In many ways, this is what made their partnership more robust than most. While some allow different creative ideas to break them down, even if they seem like good ones, Taupin and John remained aligned when it came to what they needed to do. ‘Grey Seal’ might seem at times like nothing more than a game of word salad, but if for nothing else, it proved their unwavering trust, even when shunning easy commercialism.
